https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFC/comments/1hhips1/amazon_te... Interesting to see discussion on Reddit from r/AmazonFC are pretty negative , wonder if these are genuine employees comment for PR team hired by Amazon
as a union diesel engine mechanic i can guarantee most, if not all these comments are complete PR. I went on strike about ten years ago to protest mandatory overtime and lack of chemical PPE. the minute we authorized the strike, we had news channels from three states covering us and a billboard up the road that demanded an end to the strike by "concerned" truckers was erected in hours. Every day I could count on at l…
I feel that the Luigi Mangione case is making more people aware of this type of dynamic.
I wonder that too. They been doing this for a while now around the big shopping holidays. And yet, I never hear about any major disruptions. Maybe the union needs to change tactics?
The amount of leverage workers have is proportional to how hard it is for the company to replace them. Replacing unskilled workers isn't that hard so those workers don't have much leverage. The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technician…
Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?
Amazon warehouse work pays almost $20/hour where I live, which is well above the federal minimum wage and more than almost every other company in the area for this type of work. This is a living wage. "should be replaced with robots" I also think it's funny we are having this discussion. When songwriters and other creators were complaining about piracy in the 2000s, the general response from the tech community was th…
$20/hr still isn't much money and you can only survive, note I'm not saying thrive here, on that amount in the poor areas in America. There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling. The vast majority of Americans deserve more money. Also check your priors, there are many musicians that do not com…
> $20/hr still isn't much money and you can only survive, note I'm not saying thrive here, on that amount in the poor areas in America.
That's enough to thrive in lots of places in the USA, in some cases. Maybe not the most desirable places, though.
Sure, 0.5% is hyperbole on my part. Sorry. It's not like a 20% bump in costs for these workers would result in a 20% bump in prices or anything like that. Their margin on that retail item is probably 30-40% of the cost of that product though. Let's assume the workers' benefits and wages in question here are 35% of Amazon's costs. If there was a 20% increase of that labor cost, that's going from 35% to 42% of the tota…
I don't understand how you got down from 7% down to 1.6%. I think you are not counting COGS as an expense, and that's where the error comes from. If your assumptions are otherwise correct, I think you'd get roughly a 7% increase in prices to sustain the 20% bump in wage expense.
10k is about 0.7% of their total employee count. I wonder if this will have any effect.
It will have more business people asking about robots, other than that I doubt it will. Amazon don't even care if the packages are late because of this, they still get your purchase.
Unfortunately, Moravec's paradox has you jammed up. So for now, negotiate they must.
> I also don't see how developers have any link with contract negotiations with warehouse workers? Developers obviously have no direct impact on labor conditions of the warehouse workers. However, all the time-tracking, logistical optimizations, employee monitoring systems, etc. that enable Amazon to squeeze every bit of efficacy and profit out of these warehouse workers had to come from somewhere/someone. I believe…
> I am not assigning personal blame to any developer directly Actually you did exactly that in your post that got deleted by moderation.
In hindsight, I agree with you. I did not intend for my comment to be provocative, but I now see how it comes off as such.
That doesn’t seem like a contradiction. Full time jobs should offer livable wages, part time could offer less. However, you can’t do some shenanigans like force workers to be part time by making them work less than 40 hours a week just so they don’t get classified as full time.
What is a livable wage? That differs if someone is living with their parents, or if they have 3 kids and are living alone and the sole earner in the family.
My unscientific view is a person working 40 hours a week should at least be able to afford a modest home, fresh food and other ordinary expenses. If a job pays less than that and needs to be topped up by some kind of public assistance then we should think of that as a subsidy to the business rather than welfare to the employee.
What's funny is even if you hate unions, surely the demographics who frequent HN at least has a solid grasp of the capital investments and R&D costs necessary to "replace them with robots" - We are talking about delivery station roles here. You gotta build something that, amortized, can do it for less than $500/day in a climate where Wall Street is putting pressure on tech stocks to control costs. Have at it. We hear…
Fast food - like McDonalds - have followed through with this. They now have a single human register and much smaller kitchens, and 1/2 their business is take out. It's not all automation; a lot of it is factory prep and shifting the work on to customers & gig workers.
That's fine, this is the natural and expected response to labor getting more expensive. The bad outcome is when government steps in to artificially push wages down.
> when communities trade between each other > it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce Extractive industry like Amazon kill the local producers and siphon the money out of smaller areas and concentrate it in richer areas. When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade? Amazon is an Internet-myelinated version of the Wal-Mart effect, with more packaging…
> When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade? If that were true, then sure it would be a problem. But I don't know of many communities in the US where there are literally no jobs , nothing being produced at all. Where economic activity is zero. Some jobs go away and new ones arise. And remote work makes it easier than ever for jobs to move from cities to smaller areas. Can y…
I cannot. I am operating on an assumption that each dollar that goes to Amazon vs a local producer is an opportunity cost for the community’s long-term wealth. Saving a few bucks here and there on individual purchases seems like short-term thinking and small potatoes. Scaled up, that is what lead to rust belt decay after offshoring so much manufacturing. I know a lot of ink has been spilled on the effects of walmart and dollar stores on local economies, but I will also admit that I have not done any legwork to vet the hypotheses or conclusions, or if I have, I’ve forgotten and wouldn’t be able to produce any citations. As far as I can get in systems thinking with the initial conditions I know, which is assuredly a small subset of the totality of reality, the concentration of ability to produce and purchasing power is dangerous for those in the leaf nodes. I’m always interested to see more data proving me more right right or wrong on this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFC/comments/1hhips1/amazon_te... Interesting to see discussion on Reddit from r/AmazonFC are pretty negative , wonder if these are genuine employees comment for PR team hired by Amazon
as a union diesel engine mechanic i can guarantee most, if not all these comments are complete PR. I went on strike about ten years ago to protest mandatory overtime and lack of chemical PPE. the minute we authorized the strike, we had news channels from three states covering us and a billboard up the road that demanded an end to the strike by "concerned" truckers was erected in hours. Every day I could count on at l…
I would love for astroturfing to be illegal and heavily enforced.